What Pres. Obama has done for us (or we could say what we did for ourselves by electing him) is to give us eight more years in which to deal with our biological problem and — though he stated clearly and at the first fairly frequently that he could not do what the public wanted without the backing of the public – nevertheless, when he needed support – what he got was a bunch of navel-gazing, whining children sucking at the teat of the corposystem (our corpo-political economic social system).

Just as happened after the Green Revolution. Abdication of responsibility by the people and for the people – but not by the President, who succeeded in holding back the tide of Hitlerism that is coming our way. Why do I say it is coming our way? Because we are asking for it — dancing around our personal “maypoles,” spewing our wastes into the atmosphere and chanting: “There is nothing we can do, find someone else to do it for us.” (“So we may as well do nothing but dance and play and blame someone else, and pout because we can’t all have everything we want”).

And hundreds of similar excuses to do nothing — all corposystem approved – probably corposystem generated — each taking us closer to the tipping point of our biological problem.

Corposystem approved because: a) the excuse serves our level one system, ourselves – the individual humans who would rather dance than tend to our responsibilities to the future – and, b) it serves level two, the corposystem, by preventing others from generating a solution to the biological problem that is at the root of the disarray.

And what is The Problem? The corposystem itself, of course, is not sustainable. That means, sooner or later it will crash – not because IT WANTS TO CRASH. Far from it – The CS would rather grow forever richer — but because the people are too busy dancing to support or demand the changes that could convert the corposystem into a sustainable social system – beginning with enforced removal from all corporate charters of the “growth” requirement and continuing with provision of free international access to birth control (or the other way round). A sustainable system does not destroy the Biosystem that feeds it.

And those are only two of the things that we can do.

What will NOT work is to hire a President, require her to “fix” our problems, and then get “upset and disillusioned” because she can’t change the corposystem into a sustainable system at the same time that we the people continue to support the corposystem ethic of growth by domination to give us whatever we want.

Neither can we grow a sustainable social system by hiring a President who will reinforce the corposystem ethic of growth by domination for gain that is the cause of our biological problem in the first place.

But, you tell me: “The Problem is hopeless,” enabling its hopelessness by proclaiming its hopelessness, we undermine everything the President tries to do and we abdicate our responsibility — and in so doing we serve the wants of Level One (individual people) by enabling the victim status we prefer, and we serve the desires of level Two (growth by domination for riches) by NOT forcing it to change itself into a social system that is sustainable.

With the added perk that we can then blame the rich people when the problems get bigger.

The more we proclaim the hopelessness of The Problem – the more hopeless we cause it to be. And we can sit back and enjoy “Aint It Awful.” (Games People Play, Berne, 1996)

The next step in this predictable slide from grace is physical war, as we continue to choose the failed corposystem ethic (growth by domination for winning) over common sense and common courtesy. While we dance the dance of pretty fairy tales and blame someone else for the result.

And heaven forbid anyone would do anything that would make themselves or anyone else “feel uncomfortable”.

It is foolish to compete with people who are promoting the same goal as one’s self. For one thing, it’s impossible to win. My father used to say: “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” That is not how successful systems function; and more importantly for us, it does not matter who is more important than whom; with the entire system is teetering on the edge of collapse, none of us will be important in the end — and that dominator ethic is a major cause of the failure of our corposystem in its modern environment. Growth by competitive domination for personal gain.

Successful systems, to the contrary, are supportive of their environments, which are the other half(s) of themselves.
To be supportive of a different system requires complex modes of communication, so that the complexity of the information base is first increased, and then recombined by “discussion” from all viewpoints and then translated into a “language” that interprets the information for the “other.” After thorough discussion, the relevant information is then used to respond to and support the survival needs of both (all) of the involved system(s).

That is the natural process. It is what will happen. and is happening in any case. Humans donot control nature, but humans could be part of the discussion if we would change our attitude toward both our own importance and the nature of the other systems. The advantage of being human is that we can do this process — discussion/recombination and then decision — by intent, rather than wait around for natural selection to decide. We have the tools. We lack the will.

However, if we all make the same small contribution, or if we all simply believe the world view in which we were raised, without using our tools to communicate positively with the other essential systems, then we will end up with knee-jerk radical activism that never learns more than it already knows, but instead becomes more and more violently focused on its original viewpoint (ref. Huston Smith), which is fifty years out of date.

Knowledge is not advanced without the recombination process — in humans, that process would ideally arise from discussion, defined as both listening and talking toward the common goal — rather than war — defined as ranging from the “Powers of the Weak” (Janeway), through debate, through the increasingly more violent options.

Unfortunately, our corposystem (and the people who believe in it) requires the world to bow to it’s own imaginary “survival of the fittest” event. That is, the war option, rather than the partnership option as defined by Eisler). War — for the most part, is NOT the natural system, or not the mature natural system. Highly evolved systems evolve to generate more highly evolved systems that cooperate. But war is the predictable and predicted end of the corposystem, in part because of its “dominator” world view – the suicide event of the corposystem — when opinions that have solidified into a radical versions of their own original insights cause more harm than good because they cannot adapt to any environment other than that of their own origin, which has died 50 years ago.
If we genuinely want to grow a viable system for our Homo sapien future (I don’t believe that is what most of us want in our modern corposystem; what we want is to “win,” i.e., dominate other people and nature and God — and for the most part we don’t consider what we are losing in the process — but that is a different problem). If we want to intentionally grow a viable system to replace that corposystem – then we need to have a more rational understanding of nature’s Law of Life and how it functions to drive forward the three basic requirements of naturally evolved (complex adaptive) systems:

1 – self perpetuation within the system’s other half, its environmental system (sustainability)

2 – communication between and among the systems

3 – natural selection of the emergent properties of the system by its environmental system(s).

Otherwise, the systems will choose for us, and because the corposystem is operating on a world view that is not sustainable in its present environmental conditions, the Biosystem will eliminate the greatest threat to itself, the corposystem. Or to be more accurate, the corposystem will eliminate itself by its own behaviors.

Therefore, and because I didn’t see anyone else concentrating on this approach when I began, my work involves elucidating a holistic viewpoint of how systems function in evolution, so that others may use this information as they discuss its ramifications and recombine its relevences within their own community of world views.

Because we must either choose or choose to not choose, and without the best information, the best choice is not possible.

The result of my search is given as a contribution to the community and for the love of the vision — what Homo sapiens could have been. Once I make the information available in a form that others can access — whether or not I succeed in communicating the relevance, ramifications, validity and/or implications of my alternative world view — then my obligation and my gift to the human community are fulfilled. I can’t make it happen.

Free at last!

J

Now what shall I do?

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com.

“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” ~Albert Einstein

For well over 2000 years a competitive “dog-eat-dog” mindset has dominated the world’s most powerful human civilizations. The goals of our leaders (as well as most members) have been to conquer, defeat or control whatever (and whomever) we can. Those who thought differently were quickly pushed to the side, silenced, enslaved, ignored or demonized.

Look closely at the challenges humanity has been struggling with. What is the root cause of the environmental destruction, the poverty and inequality, crime, racism, terrorism, economic instability, mindless consumerism, endless wars and skyrocketing military spending?

These problems exist (in my opinion) because the most powerful human cultures and civilizations have propagated a world view that presents life as a never-ending war between opposing forces- a struggle between good and evil, man and nature, friend and enemy, “us” vs. “them.” Such dualistic thinking can serve a useful purpose at times, but creates chaos, inequity, unhappiness and instability when allowed to…

1 – All of the Creation consists of naturally evolved, interconnected systems

a – therefore it follows that naturally evolved systems must have mechanisms to perpetuate themselves; otherwise all of the Creation would be a mish-mash of randomly interacting processes; it would fall apart.

That is why the primary function of a naturally evolved system is to perpetuate itself. Systems that cannot perpetuate themselves in a world of change are not a permanent part of the picture. They are eliminated by natural selection. The Law of Life (Lamoreux, 2016. Part One) describes some of the many mechanisms that systems use to perpetuate themselves.

b – the living earth consists of interacting systems based on the original system of Life that arose on Earth, or was delivered to Earth about 3.2 billion years ago. The living cell then adaptively radiated into many subsystems and levels of organization to generate the Life of Earth itself. Life can be defined as the ability to respond to the environment and to replicate self. All complex adaptive systems, by definition, can respond to their environments, and that is presumably why systems exist. How they do it then becomes the question.

2 – Systems must be able to communicate with each other through time (genetics and evolution) and also through space (natural selection), and not in a random or slap-dash, variable fashion, or this universe could not have happened. Therefore we can assume:

a – Evolution is not random because natural selection is not random.

b – Evolution is not primarily survival of the fittest; it is the survival of those systems that can positively communicate with each other (among themselves) to help maintain both themselves and the other systems that are necessary for their survival.

The above two statements are responses to memes that have been used by the corposystem to justify (maintain) its unsustainable system of domination behaviors (Eisler. 1987).

3 – We individuals are components of two systems (I’m simplifying the reality to clarify our problem) that at the present time have conflicting needs for their survival. One is our evolved corposystem world view. The other is the previously evolved Biosystem reality.

a – I do not believe we will save ourselves by choosing how we want to evolve (change) our basic human nature. Certainly not until we can think about systems as they are and as they function.

b – I do believe that we have finally reached the time when we must choose between the evolved world view of the corposystem and the evolved reality of the Biosystem.

This is good, because choosing is very much easier and more likely to succeed.

c – However, before we choose, it would be best to understand how the systems function to maintain themselves. Otherwise we will be flying blind in the nextfollowing step, which of course will be to decide what we can do to support our choice.

One person or small group of persons cannot accomplish this task by all saying and doing and writing the same mantra that describes the same vision within the group – and then trying to grow enough soft or hard power to beat up on others of different visions.

Furthermore, it is foolish to compete with people who are promoting the same goal as one’s self. That is not how successful systems function; it is how the failed corposystem functions. Successful systems support the other half of themselves, their environmental system(s).

This is the first half of my updated premises; second half next week.

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com

Something like 13.7 billion years ago, give or take a billion or two, so says the dominant theory of our physical sciences. And after the big bang came the creation of many abiotic (nonliving) systems and subsystems until there was our earth, circling our sun, within our solar system and then something like 4.4 billion human years later — here we are.

4.4 billion years of the creation of an earth system that consists of what modern authors refer to as “nested systems” and old-timey basic biological scientists, who didn’t have a clear vision of what is a system – we referred to this as “levels of organization.” And when Darwin and his kind came along, we realized that levels of organization of the Life of Earth reflect most of earth history, written in the language of DNA and RNA, that is (crudely and incompletely put) the Language of Life. Because of the deep nature of systems – their ability to maintain themselves and to communicate with each other, Life of Earth evolved.

It looks like a miracle to me, and our history justifies the concept that is increasingly heard – I think the famous scientist and writer Carl Sagan may have been the first to say that we are the voice, the eyes, the mind of the universe, and because of us, the universe can now perceive itself.

Elegant idea.

And of course it is not false, but it leaves out a lot of other things that are true about the Creation, and it implies – not to Sagan I think, but to many or most moderns who were raised on sociology rather than physical or biological science – it implies that humans are in charge.

We are not. What is in charge is that which created the systems, whether we choose to think of it as God or as the Laws of Nature — what we have here is a set of natural laws that were not created by humans, nor are we the first, and certainly not the last word on its eyes, ears or mind. We are less than a pale image of the Creation and the Creator — only one of the millions of systems so created.

But we have indeed magnificently understood the laws of our own creation, and a beautiful story it is.

Let’s just take the nested systems idea. I’m pretty sure people thought about nested images before we had the science to confirm it’s validity in a fact-based sort of way, but I was not here, so let’s begin with a modern view.

First we saw the “levels of organization.” That is now viewed as the levels of complexity of the nested systems. A man is more biologically complex than a kidney. that is more biologically complex than a tissue, that is more biologically complex than a cell, that is more complex than the abiotic systems of which it is composed. Putting them all together to recognize a system which functions to maintain life is certainly an insight worthy of note. And then we went a step further, in the basic science of embryology, and we thought: that looks like an origin story. Ontogony (individual development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary history). And there is reason to believe that our now did indeed evolve out of our yesterdays – the simpler systems that were.

Not very long after that realization, we began to understand that we are not at the top of that pyramid of developmental complexity. Just as our organs, tissues and cells work together to make a living organism (us) so we organisms function together with our environments to make a larger unit of life, the ecosystem, and yet more inclusive is the whole of the Life of Earth, the Biosystem.

I’m leaving out a lot of steps, to make the overview more clear, but even so, in the light of modern mathematical concepts of complex systems and information transfer, the idea of levels of organization seems now, looking back, quite primitive and two-dimensional. And the idea of nested systems also, because if I am a system and you are a system, clearly we are not only nested, but also parallel systems, and that might be why some mathematicians come up with theories that are expressed as multidimensional.

But still, in the beginning, we each arose, one system out of a simpler system out of a yet simpler system, and we each are systems that are nested, or should I say nestled, in the sweet verdant arms of our same environmental system of Life of Earth, which is the other half of us all together.